


i see potential in you

by keyshrine



Category: Z Nation (TV)
Genre: F/F, i like to write about things that never happened, the hills are alive with the sound of me dedicating myself to this ship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 12:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5496854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keyshrine/pseuds/keyshrine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Damn,” she says, when she realizes that La Reina really is waiting for her approval. It's not the word she wanted to use, not really. But she goes with it— “That's nice. Must've cost a fortune. You know, when things actually did cost fortunes,” she adds, because that's the damn truth: nothing costs anything anymore but your life and your blood, sweat, tears.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i see potential in you

**Author's Note:**

> i can't write warren worth shit i'm sorry. i'm so bad at her characterization but then i decided to write a fic in her p.o.v. for some god damn reason so. the fault is mine, really. absolutely.
> 
> what can i say??? i loved la reina, i really did. and i love warren. and i loved their scenes together. no one will ever be able to successfully convince me that la reina _didn't_ have a big ol' crush on warren. just rewatch their scenes and you'll get it.

Seeing La Reina's bed is like a dream. It's a canopy, with black silk sheets and red lace and a ridiculous amount of pillows and it's— _God,_ it looks soft. It's a nice, big, clean bed, and they're in a place that's safe and free of puppies and kittens and if Warren closes her eyes and thinks about being somewhere else other than in a zombie apocalypse surrounded by the members of a drug cartel and their Queen who's taken too quick an interest in Warren for her liking, she can imagine that there is no apocalypse. For a moment.

Less than, actually. More of a quarter of a moment before reality sets in.

Then again, she doesn't try, because that'd just be idiotic. Life is what it is, now, the world is what it is, there's no changing that. (There is, there could be, but the marks would remain, the scars would remain, the fight and the hurt and the aching emptiness would remain).

The bed's one of the most beautiful things she's ever seen this year, probably. She imagines that the slow drop of her jaw and the steady widening of her eyes when she first sees it is more than a little hilarious to see, judging by La Reina's quiet snickering beside her, but she can't help herself. Instead of running at it and bouncing on it like a child, she walks very calmly towards it, casts a glance at La Reina over her shoulder. The woman nods at her, quirks a brow, “Go ahead, _querida. Mi casa es su casa,_ eh?”

Hesitant, like something will lunge up from under the sheets and bite her—and very well aware that it's a very real possibility in the zombie apocalypse, she sits down on the edge, and it sinks, soft all around her, and La Reina is laughing at her now, full on laughing, and Warren can't even be offended. She can't blame her, either, really—she knows the look on her face must be somewhere between absolutely shocked and absolutely euphoric, like she's just found the fountain of youth or the holy grail or a shower.

She'd felt like this, too, when she realized she could have a shower, a real actual shower, for the first time in God only knew how long—exactly like this, in fact, like nothing in the world was awful and fucked up like it really actually was. Is. Maybe always will be.

“Nice, huh?” La Reina drawls, and when Warren looks at her the woman is smirking, like she knows exactly how Warren feels. But she doesn't. Here she and her Zeros get to live in the lap of luxury or as close as one gets to the lap of luxury in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, and out there is everyone else, fighting, struggling to survive without beds or showers or anything, anything at all.

Warren's not bitter. Absolutely not.

She could think about Murphy and Kurian, downstairs in the lab, Kurian doing God-knows-what to Murphy. She could think about Addy and 10k and Doc, all three of them as dolled up as she is, and she could think about Vasquez and what Escorpion is doing to him probably at this very moment. And she would—she absolutely would, but she has to play along, for now, she has to pretend that everything's fine and they'll all get out of this alive, eventually, and then La Reina is pouring her a drink, pushing it into her hand, and Warren's forced to curl her fingers around the glass or risk dropping it.

La Reina does everything with a very subtle sort of control. Subtle as in slow, steady, not violent and brutal and demanding, not subtle as in barely noticed. Oh, Warren notices. Everyone does, probably. La Reina is called the Queen for a reason, isn't she—if she wasn't controlling, now that would be something to think about, something to wonder about. But this is the Queen's domain and no one says no to the Queen, even when she asks you to go upstairs with her and have a drink with her.

The first hint is this: she doesn't so much ask as tell. La Reina asks _have a drink with me?_ but what she really means is _have a drink with me._ Question versus command.

The second hint is this: _upstairs,_ in La Reina's bedroom. Having a drink. In La Reina's bedroom.

Yeah, right.

They both know where this is going, and if all goes well Warren will stop it before it gets to that, but again: no one says no to La Reina unless they want to be stabbed to death in their sleep later that night, so. Of course Warren says yes, and with a little smile too.

La Reina sits beside her, too close, her presence some looming, vaguely suffocating thing. If Warren were someone else, she'd probably indulge the urge to sidle just a bit to the left and away, but she's not someone else and so she stays put with just a bit of effort. “Cheers,” she drawls, and tips the glass back.

It's _good._ She's had alcohol, terrible alcohol, zombie apocalypse alcohol where you barely got to savor it (and often didn't want to because it was so awful) before getting swarmed by the next round of dead things out for living flesh. But this is more than decent. La Reina seems to be waiting for some sign of her approval, eyes searching Warren's face. She's almost always like that—staring, waiting, watching, like she wants to know every single inch of Warren and what Warren is thinking.

Warren won't lie—it's a little creepy, a little flattering.

Okay—a lot creepy, but. It's the apocalypse; a lot of things are creepy and La Reina's not the worst of it, and it helps that she's a different kind of creepy and not the risen from the dead, rotting flesh creepy.

Warren decides, after a moment, that she'll stick with the word _unnerving;_ it's nicer, lighter, less harsh and blunt than the word creepy. 

(But La Reina's creepy. Or, rather, certain things about La Reina are creepy; she, as a whole, is not creepy, it's mostly the things she does that are.)

“Damn,” she says, when she realizes that La Reina really is waiting for her approval. It's not the word she wanted to use, not really. But she goes with it— “That's nice. Must've cost a fortune. You know, when things actually _did_ cost fortunes,” she adds, because that's the damn truth: nothing costs anything anymore but your life and your blood, sweat, tears.

La Reina laughs, delighted, always so damn delighted, like she's in on some big joke that absolutely no one else is and never will be, ever. Her mouth pulls back around her teeth in a wide grin, rows of pearly whites bared in the set of her face. Warren had never thought that she'd ever meet someone with such nice teeth ever again, and now look.

It must be some sort of cosmic joke, that a proclaimed Queen of a drug cartel has better teeth than probably anyone else in a post apocalyptic shitshow.

“It did,” La Reina is saying, so Warren snaps back to the present and stops focusing on those teeth, “Or, well...it would have.” La Reina pauses to take a sip, but her eyes never move away from Warren's face, just fixated there, intent. Uncomfortably so. Warren finds herself shifting in place entirely without her own consent, something crawling under her skin at the intensity of that gaze. La Reina leans in a little, and her voice is lower, warm, throaty, and the woman's accent resonates through Warren's bones when she speaks, “Aren't you glad you chose to take my offer now?”

Warren blinks, thinks something along the lines of how La Reina smells like smoke and perfume, and then thinks about how irritating it is to know that she's slightly disoriented by the sudden proximity, the lack of space left between them—she'd been doing so well up until now, too. “Which one?” she asks, idly tips her glass back and forth and watches the liquid slosh against the sides instead of watching La Reina's mouth or eyes or throat.

“The first one,” La Reina murmurs, sounds amused.

In the tunnels—La Reina turns her back, flanked by Zeros—Vasquez leans over— _take the offer_ —well, it wasn't her first choice, but she doesn't tell La Reina that, and Warren lies— “Yeah, I am.”

It's the right thing to say, apparently, because La Reina grins again, straightens, moves away, and her mouth is no longer inches away from Warren's ear and that alone is enough to make Warren relax, just a little, tension fading. Or maybe that's the alcohol helping her along.

Either way, it helps.

The ensuing silence is almost peaceful if not for the fact that her head is full of thoughts, from Murphy to La Reina and all the way back again, and not even the alcohol is doing anything to loosen that tangled thought process. She drinks more. La Reina drinks more. Eventually both of their glasses are empty, and Warren knows she'll later regret this but she lifts a brow and holds out her glass in the universal signal for _more._

La Reina laughs, pours and pours, takes a long sip of her refill and then, slowly, lays back on the bed. Warren watches her go, loosely cradling her cup in both hands. La Reina stares up at the ceiling, the black and red of her clothing mingling with the black and red of the bed, various materials pooling out around each other. They sit there in silence, longer, La Reina's half-lidded eyes darting to her every once in a while as though to check that she's still there and fully functioning and intact.

She is, but the alcohol's not helping with it; she stops thinking of Murphy and what Kurian must be doing to him and starts thinking about how the more she drinks the less odd and the more attractive La Reina looks, and that's...that's definitely a problem. Definitely.

She stands up so quickly that the room spins around her, or maybe that's less the change of position and more the alcohol, but still she stumbles, catches her balance after a moment, straightens slowly. “I should probably—“ She trails off, gestures towards the door. Thinks, with some dread, about how long it's going to take getting down all of those stairs without tripping at least once. And then thinks— _God damn, this is some strong shit,_ and it is.

La Reina sits up, both eyebrows raised. She clicks her tongue gently. “Thought we were just getting started, eh, _mi hermana?_ ”

Oh. And that's it—that's a command. Even tipsy like this she can hear it, an underlying strength in La Reina's otherwise relaxed tone. It's not a question, it's a statement. _We're not finished yet._

She gives an apologetic grimace, or maybe a smile, maybe a mix of the two—“I shouldn't. No rest for the wicked and all that.”

She half expects La Reina to lose her calm, friendly composure, in that following pause, but La Reina only eyes her for a moment, like she's considering something. “I don't bite, you know,” she speaks, and a smirk tugs at the corner of her mouth and Warren knows exactly what she's going to say before she says it— “unless that's your thing, _querida._ ”

Warren opens her mouth and only ends up closing it again, because she's not entirely sure what to say to that without being insulting or offering something that La Reina will assume is confirmation to biting being _'her thing'._ Instead, she returns, like a dog who's had its leash yanked, because really, what else is there to do? She'd like to live just a little longer, thank you very much.

“There,” La Reina purrs, “Wasn't so hard, was it?” and then she slides a hand up over Warren's hip and pulls, so suddenly that she stumbles and topples backwards onto the bed. The whole situation is vaguely absurd: she bounces somewhat on impact and knows, somewhere, in the back of her mind, that it's the alcohol, but she ends up snorting anyway.

Once the amusement has passed, she realizes that La Reina is staring at her again, head cocked a little and lips pursed. “Why do you do that?” she finds herself asking, not intentionally but it just—comes out, more straightforward than she'd ever intended.

“Mm?”

“Stare at me.”

La Reina grins, as though it's precisely the sort of question she'd wanted to be asked, and precisely the sort of question she wants to answer, and precisely the sort of question she'd been waiting for. “Why not?” she responds easily, reaches out to cup a hand around the curve of Warren's jaw and tip her head up— “Always liked looking at pretty things. And there's so few of them left out there that I might as well appreciate one when I see it, eh?”

“I'm not a _thing,_ " Warren points out, less snappishly than she would have liked. It's not supposed to be flattering but—well, how often is someone called pretty by someone who has dozens and dozens of sickeningly devoted men and women under her control, by someone who calls herself _La Reina de la Muerte,_ and who has everyone else calling her the exact same thing?

Not often, she'd bet.

La Reina smiles. “No,” she says, “You're not,” and then she's kissing Warren.

Warren doesn't mean to (just like she doesn't mean to stay), but she ends up kissing her back.

It's the alcohol.

She knows that.

It doesn't make it any easier to deal with come morning, though.


End file.
